Program

7 Apr 2018 12:00 - 13:00

Tate Talk: A Closer Look with Martina Pachmanová

In her talk, Martina Pachmanová focuses on the work by two significant, yet long-ignored women artists who lived and worked in Czechoslovakia during the communist era and who are also represented in the collection of Tate Gallery and in the Virginia Woolf exhibition: Běla Kolářová and Mária Bartuszová. Through the lenses of gender, she discusses strategies through which women artists behind the Iron Curtain tried to destabilize the petrified, largely patriarchal norms of both art and society that were based on rather paradoxical alliance of surviving monopole of the modernist tradition and the concept of art as a transcendent category and communist cultural propaganda. She will demonstrate that what seemed to be ideological “schizophrenia” was a viable means to maintain the illusion of “normalcy” in otherwise through-and-through totalitarian regime and also to marginalize those who were considered the second-rate citizens and artists: women.

ABOUT MARTINA PACHMANOVÁMartina
Pachmanová is an Associate Professor at the Department of Art
History and Theory at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague
(www.umprum.cz). As a researcher, writer and curator she specializes in gender,
sexual politics and feminism in modern, post-war and contemporary art and
visual culture, including design. She is an editor or co-editor of numerous
books and exhibition catalogues, and author of several books: Mobile Fidelities: Conversations on
Feminism, History, and Visuality (Prague 2001; in English by n.paradoxa as
an e-book: http://www.ktpress.co.uk/pdf/nparadoxaissue19.pdf); Unknown Territories of Czech Modern Art: Through the Looking Glass of
Gender (Prague 2004); The Birth of a
Woman Artist from the Lemonade Foam: Gender Contexts of Modern Czech Art Theory
and Criticism (Prague 2013), among others. Besides several monographs of
contemporary Czech women artists, including Milena Dopitová, she also published
three monographs of forgotten Czech female modernists related to their
retrospective exhibitions: Milada Marešová (2008), Marie Galimberti-Provázková
(2011), and Vlasta Vostřebalová Fischerová (2013). Pachmanová‘s essays appeared
in a number of publications published in English, including A Companion to Feminist Art (Hilary Robinson – Maria Elena Buszek, eds.,
Wiley, upcoming in 2019); Feminism – Art
– Theory: An Anthology, 1968–2014 (Hilary Robinson, ed., Wiley 2014); Performative Gestures, Political Moves
(Katja Kobolt – Lana Zdravkovic, eds., Ljubljana – Zagreb – Beograde, 2014); Gender Check: A
Reader. Art and Theory in Eastern Europe
(Bojana Pejić, ed., MUMOK – Walther Konig 2010). Currently, she is
working on a research project Civilized
Woman: Ideal and Paradox of Visual Culture of the First Czechoslovak Republic
that is focused on parallel processes of modernization and women’s emancipation
that accompanied the development of Czech modern culture between the wars.